What You Need to Know about Digital Copyright Before Your Online Classes Get Stolen

From unlocked dorms to unattended textbooks, most college campuses have had occasional issues with theft. But with the rise of online classes and venues in which you can view them, educators are facing a new kind of theft: misappropriation of their online lectures and webinars.

Sarah Jeong explored this phenomenon and the copyright implications behind them in an article for Vice's Motherboard. We've pulled a few choice excerpts, but be sure to read the whole article here.

Troy Hunt—a security researcher who also teaches “Ethical Hacking: Hacking Web Applications” on Udemy’s rival site Pluralsight—is not the only one. (His course was copied so extensively that the copycat instructor’s “name” on Udemy was “Roy Hunt”).Rob Conery, who teaches a Javascript course on Pluralsight, also reported being copied. Jeffrey Way also encountered infringement back in October.

Udemy is a market for online education. Instructors can sign up, upload their courses, and charge what they want from their students. Udemy hosts the content indefinitely on its own dime, and even spends money advertising the course. If the instructor attracts a student on their own, they keep 100 percent of the fee. If Udemy attracts a student through their advertising, they keep 50 percent of the fee.

“Roy Hunt’s” knock-off course had 1415 enrolled students at the time that Troy Hunt posted screencaps. At $47 per student, the alleged copier could have made up to $66,505, but Udemy CEO Dennis Yang wrote in a blogpost on Saturday that, “As the fraudulent instructor had created coupon codes to allow students free access to the course, no money was exchanged in this process.” It’s unclear as to what happens in other cases, if or when money does exchange hands. Presumably, since Udemy promises “lifetime access” to course materials, the students get their money refunded when a course is taken offline for copyright infringement.

It’s not clear whether at any point in the process of creating courses, Udemy verifies anything about the instructor’s identity, or even looks at the instructional videos that get uploaded. Conery’s videos still had watermarks on them.

I reached out to Udemy, and was redirected to its blogpost. I did not receive specific responses to my questions. For what it’s worth, every allegedly infringing course linked out in the Twitter threads and other online discussions about Udemy from last night is now removed.

In the meantime, the discussion has ironically turned into a useful educational exercise in how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) works.

Section 512(c) of the DMCA is known as the safe harbor provision. It immunizes online service providers—think YouTube, Reddit, Wordpress, and here, Udemy—from the copyright infringement of their users as long as the service provider fits a number of criteria.

In order to qualify for safe harbor, the service provider can’t have “actual knowledge” of infringement. US Courts aren’t completely clear on exactly what this means, but it has to be, at the very least, something more than just the knowledge that copyright infringement is happening somewhere out there.

But just because a deluge of unauthorized Daily Show clips hits YouTube every day doesn’t mean that YouTube shouldn’t be allowed to exist. The DMCA sets up a system where online service providers receive notices of infringement through a designated DMCA agent. (Udemy’s agent, for instance, can be reached at copyright@udemy.com). When the service provider receives a valid notice, they have to “expeditiously” remove or disable access to the infringing material. If they don’t, they lose their safe harbor immunity and open themselves up to a lawsuit.

The copyright situation with Udemy feels weird because education, even if it’s online, doesn’t seem to fit in the same category as YouTube or Reddit or imgur. Most of us know and accept that these sites can’t preemptively police everything that gets uploaded, but when we’re told that that’s how an “online education market” like Udemy also works, we’re surprised. How can any serious learning environment allow “Roy Hunt” to rip off “Troy Hunt” without being detected immediately? If no one’s checking for watermarks, does this mean that a Udemy science course can tell students that the sun revolves around the earth and that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams?

So copyright infringement isn’t exactly running wild on Udemy, but this isn’t the first time it’s happened, and it won’t be the last. Of course courses are getting copied. “Roy Hunt” didn’t make any money—but what about the other copiers? (Jeffrey Way’s copier could have made up to $7,087.) As long as real money is at stake, people are going to keep ripping off online courses.

Dean Asher is a former copywriter with MBS. Though he no longer writes for us, he is still proud of having helped this blog continue to evolve as an industry-leading resource of news and original content.